Militant moderate, unwilling to concede any longer the terms of debate to the strident ideologues on the fringe. If you are a Democrat or a Republican, you're an ideologue. If you're a "moderate" who votes a nearly straight party-ticket, you're still an ideologue, but you at least have the decency to be ashamed of your ideology. ...and you're lying in the meantime.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Well, That’s Over With

In 2000 I gave advice to Democrats and Republicans after Republicans took the White House. My advice to both was to pay attention to federal incursions into matters of state law. Republicans who didn’t like the Voting Rights Act owed their winning the White House to a law they denounced for decades; Democrats who loved the Voting Rights Act argued vehemently against it claiming that they could, in fact, change election procedures before the election is in the books, since they were not white racists trying to prevent blacks from voting. They were, instead, Democrats trying to prevent a Republican from winning; that’s totally different

Democrats; it was your idea in the first place; put on your big girl panties and quit crying already. Ironic, no?

Ironic, yes.

In 2004 I again gave advice to Democrats and Republicans. To Republicans it was to not be smug and complacent for political tables will always turn; to Democrats it was to grow the hell up and realize that your own political tables had turned away from you, due in large part to your own smug complacence.

In 2008 I repeated this exercise. Only to Republicans I gave a “tolja so” on the turning of the political tables with a reminder to steal the Democrat’s social issues from under them – the nation wants legal abortions even if it is uncomfortable with all abortions being legal, so drop it already; and gay marriage is a fulfillment of our rights to Free Association and Equal Protection – it’s time to claim that issue as your own while Democrats are still mealy-mouthing about “legal unions”.

I reminded Democrats that they won only because their candidate didn’t have an [R] after his name, and not because the one-third of us in the middle wanted his socialist nonsense. The nation did not [and does not] want endless governmental nannying, and the nation did not [and does not] want Obamacare – some of the issues their party and their candidate, respectively, were advocating.

What the nation wanted was a removal of the onerous, insulting and tyrannical violations of civil rights that Democrats had spent seven of Bush’s eight years denouncing. So were a great many Republicans denouncing them as well, just like us libertarians always do. What the nation wanted was an end to $500B deficits, when the bulk of that money was being used on wars that had long grown pointless, as well as making it simpler for the government to violate our civil rights. So my advice to Democrats was to remember that being “not Bush” wasn’t good enough.

It also wouldn’t hurt to stop portraying Obama as “black” ... for he is not. If you want to move the nation beyond race, then he’s a mutt. Honesty matters, doesn’t it?

The first thing Democrats did after my ’08 advice was to forget about our least-productive war – the daily body counts stopped with the change in Commander-in-Chief, literally overnight ... it might embarrass the guy, or something, and we can’t have that! You don’t embarrass the President of the United States, not if you’re a true American. It just isn’t done! ...unless he has, like, an [R] after his name, or something.

Shortly after that was the race-baiting “beer summit” where “I’m a mutt, and if I can figure out how to work together the two of you certainly can” was never uttered.

Next they forgot all about the $500B deficits which were a millstone around the neck of the United States, and shoveled money hand over fist to the auto industry full to the top with union labor, and to the same financial industry which created our “great recession” by following federal regulations to the T and, which also [surprise, Democrats!] contributes to the Democratic party in much the same way as the oil industry contributes to Republicans. They also funneled the single largest chunk of “stimulus” money to the pork project of TSA by which they could invest in a whole new range of expensive electronics to further violate our civil rights with. The makers of such equipment tend to be Democrats and also contribute heavily to Democrats’ coffers... including to my own Senator Dick “US Soldiers are Nazis” Durbin. The deficit ballooned to $1,000B, and then to $1,500B.

The coup d’merde before the midterm was, of course, the passage of Obamacare, which was opposed by 60% of the nation – some areas more than others and, with the exception of large cities, favored by no distinct demographic. It was at this point that I thought there might have been some hope for the US; Congress went R in a big way and even Kennedy’s seat went to a – can it be?? – Republican. The only reason the Senate was also not a majority Republican house is, as I reminded the aforementioned nazi-baiter Durbin, only a third of the Senators were up for re-election.

Durbin actually seemed contrite after the 2010 election, giving an address to the nation indicating that, as Number Two Democrat in the Senate, he had learned his lesson about Democrats’ profligate spending. Uh huh. Congress went back into session, and with it went my nazi-baiting Senator bought and paid for by Goldman-Sachs and the makers of TSA’s backscatter machines; as Lincoln’s Secretary Cameron suggested the honest politicians would do, Durbin stayed bought. Will of The People be damned.

Among the bright spots in the 2010 midterm was a quasi-libertarian movement coming out of the Republican party, which demanded strict Constitutional limitations of federal government power – which is to say, its bureaucratic authority and the budget such bureaucrats command – and a return of our lost civil rights. These “Tea Party Republicans” were at odds with everyone in Washington, including their own erstwhile party leaders whom they believed had been seduced by the Dark Side of politics – political contributors [which, among Republicans not already invested in reduced government, is pretty much limited to the social issues criticized earlier] and their “honesty” to stay bought.

But between the midterm and 2012, the Tea Party was at once denounced by the Democrats so hidebound that they see any and every criticism of a socialist mutt as being racially motivated, and it was infiltrated by the social conservatives who don’t know when to leave the 1950s behind.

Once again, I am bereft of a legitimate toehold in either political party. Democrat math teaches 2+2=22 and other psychoses, and Republicans are too busy being their brothers’ keeper that they can’t see straight. Neither one has more than a passing familiarity with the US Constitution – including the newly re-elected socialist mutt who claims to having taught the subject in law school. I dispute that claim; he may have stood in front of the classroom, but he could not teach the subject because he knows nothing about it.

Democrats use the Constitution as a public wiper of tears for all those instances when people fall down and get ouchies ... when they aren’t using it as an ass-wiper for those who shit their own beds – both exactly as the Constitution does not authorize; Republicans roll it up to use as a blunt instrument to beat outliers and odd ducks into the same rigid conformity that our Constitution was written to not mandate. Neither party understands that the Constitution is the upper limit of government power, and not the starting point for government power. It was designed to limit government power and give The People the right to succeed or fail all on their own, and to be left the hell alone while they went about it.

Democrats want to reward failure and punish success and pester everyone to those ends; Republicans want to simply pester everyone to make sure they’re all properly regimented. To hell with you both.

So here’s my advice, like quadrennial clockwork.

For Democrats it’s easy: look to Greece and Spain – that’s the future you’re building for us. And stop it. It doesn’t matter how many teary-eyed didactic digressions you can avail yourselves of, or the slimy, pious morality snail-tracking behind you: a government has only so much money, and only so much credit, and once it’s gone – no matter how swell a reason you can come up with to spend it – you will cease to exist. Yeah, I know, “the United States isn’t Greece and Spain”... and Greece and Spain aren’t the Soviet Union, either; is it making a difference to them? or are they both falling into fiscal pieces? Two plus two does NOT equal twenty-two. Learn math and stop punishing wealth.

Republicans ... oy. To steal a phrase: It’s the economy, stupid! It’s always the economy; barring Huns wading ashore to rape and pillage, it’ll never be anything else. You’re the only major political party who knows math and understands that if we don’t have rich people allowed to become rich so they can provide the lion’s share of the taxes by which the poor people get their free ride, then our nation will fall apart just as Greece and Spain are doing, and which the Soviet Union already did. And so I say this with all the patience I can muster, which isn’t much as I feel like I’m talking to an idiot savant or other “autism-spectrum” specimen of modest potential but blinding, blinkered self-involvement:

1] drop abortion, it annoys the women when you go on and on about it;

2] drop everything related to abortion, which includes stem cell research, since it annoys those with college educations who frequently work in those areas;

3] drop every religious quibble with science, which includes creationism and its “Creationism in Science’s clothing” cousin: “intelligent design”, as it insults anyone not currently in a Sunday School class;

4] latch onto gay marriage as a celebration of Americans’ rights to freely associate and be treated equally under the law despite the concurrent right of others to despise it and say so. Simply put, acknowledge that freedom is messy, and requires nonconformity to coexist with denunciation of the nonconformists, likewise requiring individual failure to coexist with individual success [which Democrats cannot fathom]; and finally

5] nag, harp, pester, harangue and browbeat Democrats about one thing and one thing only: the economy – about what happens when you subsidize failure, reward non-participation, and punish wealth; about how the punishment of wealth is observed in industry, industrialists, and jobs leaving the country to find a healthier environment for them to live; about how regardless of the “humanity” shown by robbing a rich Peter to pay a poor Paul, there is a very short limit as to how much can be robbed before Peter becomes poor himself, or simply takes his money out of reach by moving to Switzerland or Cayman Island.

And remind them that Paul has never ended up being better off than he started after getting Peter's money.

The government cannot fundamentally do anything for Paul’s lasting benefit: government is the least effective means of creating social change ever invented – it’s why our Constitution does not give the federal government any authority in that area. The only tool government has is law, and subsequent punishment for law-breakers; law is notoriously inept at doing anything besides creating criminals and bureaucrats, while breeding a popular resentment of the tyranny the law engenders.

When the law is used against thieves and killers and those thieves and killers get resentful, the rest of society can live with it; when the law is used against someone for having a lack of social conscience while being rich and he gets resentful ... he moves his wealth, business and jobs to Honduras. And that, the rest of society cannot live with; society dies without jobs.

Democrats will refuse to pay attention to my advice, and so that leaves you.